Hi all -
I noticed the other day that it’s possible to truncate a string such
that it has trailing spaces before it appends the omission characters.
Notice the space in the output below.
ruby-1.8.7-p330 :007 > “one two three”.truncate(7)
=> “one …”
In my opinion, that space shouldn’t be there.
I was going to submit tests and a patch to correct it, but was hoping to
get some feedback to see if I’m wasting my time as people expect this (I
can’t think of a reason…).
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?
-philip
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 7:31 PM, Philip H. [email protected]
wrote:
ruby-1.8.7-p330 :007 > “one two three”.truncate(7)
=> “one …”
In my opinion, that space shouldn’t be there.
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?
I can imagine circumstances involving fixed-width fonts where having
an unpredictable number of characters left would be bad, and at the very
least a POLS violation.
And personally, the space being included doesn’t bother me. 
FWIW!
Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]
twitter: @hassan
ruby-1.8.7-p330 :007 > “one two three”.truncate(7)
=> “one …”
In my opinion, that space shouldn’t be there.
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?
I can imagine circumstances involving fixed-width fonts where having
an unpredictable number of characters left would be bad, and at the very
least a POLS violation.
That’s a good case. I’d counter that if the widths are important you
can’t use truncate because if the string is shorter than you expect it
won’t be padded properly anyway. Still… worth considering.
I went ahead and wrote the patch and submitted it with comments about
the change in behavior. I could always add a “strip” option to get what
I want.
If anyone is interested…
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/6357-patch-to-remove-trailing-spaces-from-truncate-result
And personally, the space being included doesn’t bother me.
Heh. It drives me crazy
-philip
Robert W. wrote in post #978946:
Philip H. wrote in post #978930:
I went ahead and wrote the patch and submitted it with comments about
the change in behavior. I could always add a “strip” option to get what
I want.
If anyone is interested…
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/6357-patch-to-remove-trailing-spaces-from-truncate-result
This might be fine for English (or English like) strings, but not all
language necessarily separate words by space characters.
Truncate is not strip. It probably should not make this assumption.
Oh! I forgot to mention that truncate already includes the :separator
option:
truncate(“Once upon a time in a world far far away”, :length => 17,
:separator => ’ ')
Philip H. wrote in post #978930:
I went ahead and wrote the patch and submitted it with comments about
the change in behavior. I could always add a “strip” option to get what
I want.
If anyone is interested…
https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/6357-patch-to-remove-trailing-spaces-from-truncate-result
This might be fine for English (or English like) strings, but not all
language necessarily separate words by space characters.
Truncate is not strip. It probably should not make this assumption.
This might be fine for English (or English like) strings, but not all
language necessarily separate words by space characters.
I’m not sure that matters. I don’t mind if “Hello World” gets truncated
to “Hel…”. I do mind (from an aesthetics point of view) “Hello
…”…
Truncate is not strip. It probably should not make this assumption.
Perhaps not. But there’s no other way to clean that up which means I’d
have to write my own truncate method which also seems wrong. 
Oh! I forgot to mention that truncate already includes the :separator
option:
truncate(“Once upon a time in a world far far away”, :length => 17,
:separator => ’ ')
That will force the break on a space. I don’t necessarily want that
either.
All valid though. We’ll see what core says on the ticket. If they
prefer I add a :strip => true option I’m fine with that as it gets me
what I want without changing defaults…
-philip